


you are all I need and all I can defend

by orphan_account



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Canon Jewish Character, F/M, Human Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 03:53:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2094705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They think she's confused and helpless, even her brother. But they're all wrong.</p><p>(Wanda experiments with her new powers, slogs through torture, and terrifies her twin. She'll make everyone who's hurt them pay.)</p><p>(an attempt to reconcile the vacant-eyed Scarlet Witch in the trailer with the badass young woman of the comics)</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are all I need and all I can defend

It's been a month since they were allowed to so much as brush fingers, and now they're so close but yet so far. They've put her on the other side of a soundproof one-way mirror that he hasn't been able to so much as crack. She's rotating the blocks in the air, making them bounce against each other; he watches out of the corners of his eye, drumming his fingers at a steady blur. The look in her eyes is so at odds with his knowledge of the passionate young woman who's half of his soul: she seems like she's sleepwalking, like she's staring at something as far away as a star. What have they done to her today?  
She shatters the blocks apart and drives a splinter of wood through her hand.  
Instantly he's on his feet, pummeling the wall. "Wanda! WANDA!"

As the guards drag her away, she gives them a mischievous-angel smile. 

"I want to see my sister," he keeps saying. Maybe if he bothers them enough they'll let him hold her just for a moment.  
So far they've been using them in experiments: do this, or we'll hurt your twin. Run this maze or she gets shocked. Manipulate probability to figure out the code to open this safe or we'll break his legs. Only if they perform to their captors' satisfaction do they get to so much as clasp hands for the space of a breath.

Hydra came to them in the middle of the night and gave them a choice. No, not a choice. An ultimatum.  
You are the children of Red Skull, the übermenschen of the future. Your parents stole you from the lab where they were employed as menial workers. Now you must return to us or we will destroy everyone you've ever loved.  
In order to keep their family from seeking to rescue them, they worked to alienate their community. They pretended to be everything they'd always despised until even their own parents wept over them.  
Now they only had each other.

At last he figures out what to say. "If you don't let me see my sister I'll hit my head against the wall until I die."  
He needs to know that Wanda's really still with him, that they haven't amputated her playful intelligence.  
Maybe he finally hits some sort of peak threshold of bothersome, because the next thing he knows, he's getting hit with knockout gas- but then he wakes up and they're in the same cell.

Since childhood her brother has talked in his sleep. The first thing she hears is his voice, slipping in and out of German, and she forces herself to open her eyes. "Wanda, please…" His expression grows troubled as he tries to reach out, his voice barely more than a whisper; unconsciousness has stilled his speed in a way that nothing else can. "Her mind… her brain… no, come back. I need you." True agony underscores his words. As her vision clears, she notes the purple shadows under his eyes, the ashen pallor of his skin. With grim determination, she fights against the effects of the drug and crawls to him.  
"I'm still here," she whispers, her soft fingertips skimming the lines of his face. "I'm still here, Pietro. And I will never leave you, not ever. Yes, sometimes I roam the myriad worlds… but I swear to you, my beloved brother, I will always come back."  
Slowly his shivering stills, his mouth softens- and then, a moment after he goes still, his startlingly blue eyes open.  
She'll never get tired of his smile.  
Managing to sit up, he draws her into his arms, and her wild dark curls spill over them both.  
"I thought- when you hurt yourself, you scared me, Wanda."  
They spoke in the secret code they'd had since childhood, a mixture of Romani, Yiddish, and words from every country they'd passed through.  
"I thought there was something crawling on me. There's a parallel universe where they haven't killed all the rats, and it's very close to this one. Sometimes they overlap." A wan, yet brave smile. "And I got a look at the layout of the facility when they were fussing over me at the infirmary. It'll be useful if we manage to escape."  
"I'm so proud of you," he whispers, holding her close.  
"There are so many possibilities, brother. So many worlds. Sometimes I have to get a little lost in order to explore. Whatever they gave me, they shot me full of it. I feel…"  
She smiled crookedly as he brushed a curl from her cheek. "Uncanny. Strange. And I can feel the auras of everything. Energy fields and probabilities. The universe has opened up to me at last."  
"Yeah, right. What's my aura like?"  
"Exactly the same. A neon sign proclaiming-" and she gestured dramatically, "I am a great big schlimazel. Every part of me moves fast except my brain."  
"Up yours," he murmurs in Polish, kissing her forehead. The slowness of the movement makes his heart pound, but he feels her smile-  
Gas hisses into the cell again.

The last thing he hears before he passes out is Wanda screaming "Fuck your mother's shit with a shovel!" in rapid angry Romani. That's my sister, he thinks. That's my girl.

It's an hour later and he still hasn't woken up. He still hasn't woken up when they take him away.  
Right now everything is so much and she feels like she's going to fly apart, but she knows when she figures out how to pull it all inside her skin, how to tune out the background shimmers and focus on just one bright thing, she'll have a dangerous level of control over her surroundings and her world.  
Focus on your own soundness of mind, she tells herself, lifting one block and then the next without touching it, working them into a figure eight pattern like she's doing mental tai chi. Focus, power, and control.  
I can do this.  
I am strong.

She breaks her toys. They give her new ones. Time blurs away into unimportance. Sometimes they take her out and hurt her, inject her with chemicals, take her so far away from her brother that she can no longer feel his presence against the edge of her consciousness. Once, marched through a corridor, she thinks she hears him screaming.  
But they always throw her back into her cell. A cell, at least.  
They're letting her get stronger.  
Big mistake.

Every time she shatters a block to splinters, rips the seams of a plush rattle with the sweep of her hands, she imagines breaking heads and bones. When she's thrown back into her cell after a long day of torture, her empty stomach constantly picks at her awareness as she shivers in her thin nightgown. Pietro, she thinks, hugging herself. I want you here. I need you here to keep me warm. She imagines him picking her up as if she's lighter than a dandelion seed and running away from here with her, the steady rhythm of his footsteps lulling her into dreamless sleep.  
Instead she hears men's voices gossiping. The sound assaults her ears.

"Look at the way she was all over her brother earlier. I bet she's a whatsit, a scarlet woman. That's what they used to call whores."  
"I'd do her, if she wasn't such a psycho witch."  
The guards laugh about it and turn off the lights.

It's night cycle, which means they get monitored through computers instead of in person and they get to sleep. Tomorrow they probably have another brutal round of experiments ahead of them.  
Scarlet woman psycho witch, Wanda thinks, lying in the dark and listening to the rhythm of every inanimate object around her, thrum, thrum. Scarlet psycho woman witch.  
Scarlet witch psycho…  
Scarlet Witch.  
(She keeps the name.)


End file.
